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Monday, March 14, 2016

Something New

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“How strange to step off the streets one
minute and then twenty minutes later to be safely on fire. Puffs of smoke were
coming from his pale half-naked body, rising past his nose…. Some part of him
thought, okay, why not, it ends right here. Middle-aged white men were a huge
problem in the world. If the chance arose to incinerate one – yes, on the
whole, go for it.” (Chap.1, p.7)

The paragraph
introduces exactly the novel’s major focus – the travails of a “middle-aged white man”, a Pakeha New
Zealander, as he reassesses his life and tries to come to terms with weighty
matters like ageing, family and the spectre of death. A man who is a “huge problem in the world”, but mainly a
huge problem to himself.

Michael Stirling,
his body only notionally on fire, is being treated for cell carcinoma. He is an
acoustic engineer: the guy who devises sound-scapes for new buildings and
special spaces. He is separated from his wife of more than 20 years, Vanessa.
Their daughter Samantha (always called Sam in the novel) has gone off to Elam
art school in Auckland, leaving Michael in Wellington. Michael feels the male
equivalent of “empty nest blues”. He is ageing, he is a little shell-shocked
and certainly he is lonely. He lives by himself in an upmarket Wellington
apartment building called The Sanctum. His hold on his family is tenuous and
his grumpy old father, Derek, is suffering the early stages of dementia in a
nursing home. Countering this disintegration, Michael is attempting to
establish new connections and relationships. He’s joined a te reo discussion group, apparently trying to redefine himself as a
better and more fully-aware New Zealander. He’s on the dating scene, looking
for a new life-partner, although his success there isn’t great.

Diagnosed thus,
Michael Stirling sounds like a sociological “case” – a neat example of
middle-aged angst. Part of the beauty of Wilkins’ novel is the way Michael
becomes much more than this, although he is placed in a web of controlling symbols
and allusions. Take that upmarket apartment block. Its very name, The Sanctum,
suggests something rarefied and separated from the world, as Michael often is.
This image meshes with Michael’s career as an acoustic engineer to comment on
his separation from others. After we have been told the arcana of sound
recording and acoustics, and after we have considered the matters of noise and
silence, we get:

“He’d always liked Schafer’s idea that we
should promote the sounds we want to hear and not focus too much on those we were
banishing. Conceived positively, the banishing would almost take care of
itself. His stereo speakers sounded, if anything, too dull, even though he
figured there was sufficient glass around. The absorption was at a very high
value. When he put a glass of water down on the granite sink, the sound’s
stoniness was too mute. A hundred feet below him he could watch a man walking a
dog – a little silent movie, the silence so complete it was eerie. Of course he
was projecting his own loneliness – listening to his footsteps as he walked
across the apartment from floor to rug to floor – but still. The doors closed
with ear-hurting whooshes, like vaults, sealing everything – he was always
afraid of being locked out, not just of his place but all over….”(Chap. 2,
p.23)

Promoting “the sounds he wants to hear” and
banishing the rest is part of Michael’s problem in life. And being in a tower
where people outside are “a little silent
movie” says much about his alienation. This image is ramped up later when,
from his high window, Michael witnesses, in complete silence, a man having a
heart attack on the apartment block’s tennis court down below. At certain
points, it is suggested that Michael’s solitariness is not just a recent
development in his life. One part of his backstory is the dangerous game he
used to play as a teenager of breaking into a friend’s house, completely on his
own, to raid its food and drink without anyone to see.

Then there’s
that matter of inexorable ageing and hearing the chimes at midnight. Having to
care for his aged, slightly demented, father Derek is part of this. Derek was
once a professional geologist. The hardness of rocks may relate to the hardness
of his character. (I am not clever enough to work out what the profession of
Michael’s estranged wife signifies. She is a veterinarian. Maybe this simply
means she is a veterinarian.) Derek’s shift from home to nursing home is
shattering for Michael, and its awful finality is underlined by the implicit
comment on the worth of Derek’s whole working life made in the following:

“An antiquarian bookseller had spent thirty
minutes with his father’s extensive collection of geology books, making a pile
of some dozen titles and agreeing on a price. Hundreds of books remained and no
other bookseller would agree to even take a look. It was Michael, not Derek,
who appeared to suffer the full melancholy power of this abandonment. Here
still were the books his father had built a professional life around and which
he’d protected by designing special cabinets with glass doors. In the end two
blokes from the Salvation Army scooped them into boxes after they’d come for a
sofa, some old dining room chairs and a chest of drawers.”(Chap. 6, p.68)

At certain
points, Michael finds himself sharing unwillingly the values of his parents’
generation. His mental arteries are hardening, as when we are told: “He avoided Courtenay Place at night.
Reactionary editorials, dispiritingly, got it right every time.” (Chap.16,
p.222) “Dispiritingly” at least because Michael now finds himself agreeing with
what he did not think himself part of.

To finish my
sounding of the novel’s big symbols, there’s another in this novel. Michael’s
daughter comes back from Auckland with her fellow art-student Matiu. They
(Pakeha girl, Maori boy) are literally tied together by a length of rope. It’s
a performance art thing to which they are bound by a signed contract. But – oh
boy! – what can be read into this length of rope about the ties that bind,
marriage, family and so forth, and the constraints and awkwardness they
sometimes inflict. And, if you like, what can be read into it about the
relationship of Maori and Pakeha, also bound by a signed document.

So far, I have
completely misled you about the nature of this novel. I have made it sound far
more solemn and mannered than it is. What I’ve said about the protagonist’s
condition is accurate: lonely middle-aged man, estranged from wife, having a
hard time relating to young adult daughter, hearing the tread of mortality in
his hospitalised father’s condition and desperately trying to make new
connections. But the arc of the narrative is far more lively than this. In
fact, much of it can be read as comedy. How Michael relates to the widowed Chrissie,
his latest find on the dating scene, is a mixture of farce and acute
awkwardness. Ditto his negotiations with Sam and Matiu. There is pain in an
angry scene where father (justly) rebukes adult child for a lack of courtesy,
and then feels guilty about it; but there is also a degree of pure slapstick in
Sam’s and Matiu’s being roped up. While old Derek may be grumpy and a bit of a
nuisance, there is an odd imaginativeness and creativity to the flaws of his vocabulary,
imposed on him by creeping dementia. And the novel’s final note – at least
where Michael’s personal relationships are concerned – is one of cautious
optimism.

In fact at
times, Damien Wilkins seems to be greatly enjoying himself taking the piss, and
no more so than in the way he depicts Wellington and its revered institutions. “Snoring in the Sanctum – it could be the
title of a play at Circa,” reflects Michael as he thinks of his current
domestic life. (Chap. 6, p.67) When Michael takes Chrissie to a play, we are
told “Michael had given her a lift home
after Bats. The play had done its job, he thought – 55 minutes, not terrible
and definitely discussable.” (Chap. 9, pp.109-110). Those last seven words
are the definitive review of most live plays in little theatres. The te reo class is the most obvious site of
comic relief, especially when Wilkins (Chap.8, pp.104-106) has a woman
stridently offering her opinions on what Pakeha writers are really thinking
when they deal with Maori characters. When Michael, to amuse Chrissie’s young
son, visits the Weta Workshop-devised Gallipoli exhibition at Te Papa, we can
of course remind ourselves that his are the thoughts of a fictitious character
and not of the author; but I do wonder how much Michael’s thoughts are in fact
the heartfelt thoughts of the author himself – in which case I have to say I
agree with them completely. They range from “How had a bunch of film nerds, model makers and war-gamers managed to
co-opt the national story?” to “They
had an orgy of necrophilia to walk slowly around. They had the scrupulously
researched bad taste of adult boys to solemnise.” (Chap.12 pp.151-156) This
witty, mocking spirit is also found when the novel touches on the flag-change
controversy and inserts fleeting guest appearances by John Key, Jemaine
Clement…. and Janet Frame.

I’m not
suggesting that Dad Art is only
comedy. There is great skill in the way that, just at the right moment, dark backstories
of both Michael and Derek appear, enlarging our understanding of why these two
men became the people they are. Nor am I suggesting the novel is flawless. The
meaning of the title, and perhaps of the whole novel, is spelled out a little
too patly for us in the last chapter, when we are given a brief discourse on
the American performance artist Linda Montano and her roping experiment, which
Sam and Matiu have emulated. But this is still an excellent exploration of
parenthood, adult responsibilities and how grown-ups relate to grown children,
entering some of the same territory as Wilkins’ earlier Somebody Loves Us All.

Two years ago, when I
reviewed for Landfall Wilkins’ novel
about Thomas Hardy, Max Gate, I asked
“Did Damien Wilkins expect us to read
this novel in a spirit of sorrow or in a spirit of laughter?” The obvious
answer is “Both”. The same goes for Dad
Art.